Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao (王文濤) told Micron Technology Inc president and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra that Beijing would welcome the US semiconductor company deepening its footprint in the Chinese market, signaling a further thaw in relations between the world’s top two economies.
In a meeting on Wednesday, Wang told Mehrotra that China would optimize the environment for foreign investment and provide service guarantees for foreign firms, according to a brief statement published yesterday on the Chinese Ministry of Commerce’s Web site.
“We welcome Micron Technology to continue to take root in the Chinese market and achieve better development under the premise of complying with Chinese laws and regulations,” Wang added.
Photo: Bloomberg
The detente comes just months after China’s cyberspace regulator said Micron had failed a network security review and barred Chinese operators of key infrastructure from buying from the largest US memory chipmaker.
China’s move against Micron was widely seen as retaliation for Washington’s efforts to restrict Beijing’s access to key technology.
It came just a day after G7 nations agreed they would look to “de-risk, not decouple” from China, and as the US pressured allies to join it in restricting chip equipment exports to China.
The meeting between Wang and Mehrotra is in line with a recent thawing in tensions between Washington and Beijing, as officials from both countries work to organize a meeting between US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping (習近平), later this month at the APEC summit in San Francisco.
Washington wants to build an economic relationship with Beijing that takes into account national security and human rights and is fair to both sides, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said on Thursday.
In laying out the Biden administration’s economic approach toward the Indo-Pacific region, Yellen said Washington does not seek to decouple from China, but it wants to diversify by investing at home and boosting links with trusted countries in the region.
“We’ve put forward a vision of the world grounded in values we share with these allies and partners and in which there is also a healthy and stable economic relationship between the United States and China,” Yellen said in a speech hosted by the Asia Society less than two weeks before the annual meeting of APEC leaders.
Additional reporting by AP
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